There are few things in life more satisfying than turning off a terrible baseball game to do something more enjoyable only to turn it on later to discover that while you were away and inwardly conceding defeat, something ridiculously fantastic happened. One of the more satisfying things is actually watching those ridiculously fantastic things happen.

My personal experience with Sunday’s game was the former, but I’ll take it. When I disgustedly moved on with my afternoon, it was 7-3 Brewers in the 7th. This situation produced in me a similar emotion to that given by my subsequent action, removing some mold-covered cheese from my rot-smelling refrigerator. This refrigerator is basically a mold factory–you can’t leave food in there for more than a few minutes or it’ll start crawling with some ungodly pestilence. Sorta like leaving Ryan Mattheus in this game.

When I checked my phone for the score a considerable amount of time later, I naturally assumed the game would be long over, the Nats having settled for a series split–the most mediocre of outcomes against the most mediocre of teams. When the score appeared as 11-9 Nats in the top of the 11th, I first paused for a few moments to ensure that my score-checking app hadn’t randomly decided to show me the results of a Nats/Brewers game from 2007 or something. But no. It had actually happened. My wrongly-colored sliced cheese had transformed from smelling like death itself to exuding the sweet scent of whatever the Nationals version of this would be. In the metaphor, at least–in real life the cheese still smelled horrible.

At first I wondered things like “how” and “who” and “why” and “will this dramatically alter the course of the future of the universe?” I’d later find out the answers (4 runs in the 8th, 2 in the 9th, 2 in the 11th/Roger Bernadina, Michael Morse, John Axford, and the eminently hateable Jose Veras/because all previous events in history had somehow contributed to predetermining this outcome in ways that are not comprehensible to humans/no), but those didn’t matter. In the end it was just another improbable win for a Nats team that seems to have no regard for probability, morality, or public nudity laws (I assume).

Let’s hope they win a few more so we can have a naked World Series parade in November.

Bryce Harper: 2-7, 2 RBI, 2K, walk-off single in 12th. It would have been Harper’s first career walk-off, except that Bryce Harper doesn’t walk off. He sprints off. Actually, he sprints everywhere. That serves him well on the baseball field, but it does tend to piss everyone off when he attends a Walk for Breast Cancer event.

Shame of the Game:

Jordany Valdespin: 2-4, HR, 2 R, RBI, K, 2 E. There was a lot of shame to go around this game, and there are many potential Shame of the Game winners who I hate to deprive of their rightful disgrace. But Valdespin’s two 10th inning errors, including a booted double play ball that would have won the Mets the game, easily wins the “most hilariously, predictably Met thing to do” award.

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The Nationals used a time-honored strategy of Met-beating on Tuesday night: “get behind and wait for the Mets to mess up.” It worked to perfection. After going up 3-0 early, the Nationals dutifully let the Mets take the lead three times. The first two times, the Mets only messed up enough to let the Nationals tie the game, but the third time was the “charm.” I put charm in quotes because I don’t believe in magic or superstition. I just believe in the natural law of the universe that the longer you keep playing the Mets, the higher the probability that they’re going to fuck everything up in hilariously catastrophic and soul-crushing-to-their-fans fashion. By the time the Elvin Ramirez delivered his 47th pitch of the inning to Bryce Harper with the bases loaded in the 12th, that probability had crossed the threshold to absolute inevitability. Sure, it’s easy to say that events were inevitable after they happened, but really. The Mets were always going to lose last night in a way that was funny and bad. Continue reading →